Imagination PowerVR Driver Being Extended To Work On RISC-V

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phoronix.com, Dec. 05, 2024 – 

he Linux 6.8 kernel merged the Imagination PowerVR driver as a new open-source driver for supporting the PowerVR "Rogue" graphics architecture and being developed in tandem by Imagination Tech with their upstream Mesa Vulkan driver. Initially this PowerVR driver was catering to ARM SoCs with the Rogue graphics while now the open-source driver is being extended to work on RISC-V too.

The motivation with the new set of 14 patches for the Imagination PowerVR Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver is for enabling the Imagination Technologies BXM-4-64 GPU found on the LicheePi 4A board. The LicheePi 4A is a RISC-V single board computer making use of a T-HEAD TH1520 SoC.

Interestingly this new patch series for PowerVR driver support on RISC-V / the BXM-4-64 on LicheePi 4A is coming from a Samsung engineer, Michal Wilczynski. Those interested in this ability to use the open-source PowerVR driver on RISC-V hardware can see this patch series for the code now under review.

The LicheePi 4A RISC-V board has 4 / 8 / 16GB LPDDR4x memory options, Gigabit Ethernet, eMMC storage up to 128GB, HDMI 2.0 4K@60 output, and other basics. With the TH1520 SoC besides the PowerVR graphics there are four C910 RISC-V CPU cores.

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